Pastor Tim Patoka
Stories of the Promise #2 December 8, 2019 The Story of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar – Repent! Daniel 4:19-37 1) Repentance Requires a Change of Heart 2) God Promises Blessings to his Repentant Children
Sometimes it’s nice to watch a movie when you just want to relax. There’s all sorts of movies out there depending on what you want. You have predictable yet show-stopping blockbusters like The Avengers franchise. You know who the good and bad guys are. You know that after some close calls and special effects, the good guys will win in the end. You have the other extreme with movies based on real events or documentaries. The characters are complex and sometimes leave you with more questions than answers. You have another category in the middle which feature a twist where the main villain turns into a hero due to a change of heart. Movies like Beauty and the Beast, A Christmas Carol, and perhaps the original Frozen. I find for myself that movies which have this change of heart aspect are especially interesting because they are surprisingly intriguing. As far as I know, no one has made a movie about our story for this morning about Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar. But we do have that change of heart aspect going on with King Nebuchadnezzar. It is that change of heart idea which we’ll be looking at this morning as we focus on our worship service’s theme for this morning of: “Repent!” For repentance requires a change of heart concerning sin. But it is a joyful exercise since God promises blessings to his repentant children. 1) Repentance Requires a Change of Heart When I teach repentance in my Youth Confirmation Class, I define it as having three steps. First, repentance is to genuinely confess your sins. You can’t just say the words. It has to come from the heart. Second, repentance is to trust in God’s promise of forgiveness. More on that later. Third, repentance is to live a life free from the sins we just repented of. If we’re sorry for committing such sins, then why would we choose to go back to them again? If you remove any of those steps, then repentance ceases to be repentance. But if you wanted to summarize it into a single phrase, you could say that repentance is a change of heart concerning sin. Instead of sin being something I enjoy, it is something that saddens my Savior. If I call myself a Christian, how I can persist in doing something that grieves the one who gave his very life for me? If we have a change of heart concerning sin, then these three steps of repentance will naturally happen. We see this play out in our story for this morning about Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar. Now when I say story, I don’t mean it’s fictional. These events are history and happened 1